Knights mount genocide petition

Catholic News Service

3/02/16

Refugees and migrants from Iraq and Syria wait for permission to leave a registration and transit camp near Gevgelija, Macedonia, Feb. 24.

WASHINGTON - As a mid-March deadline approaches for U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry to make a decision on whether
to make a declaration of genocide in the Middle East, the
Knights of Columbus, based in New Haven, Conn., and the
Washington-based group In Defense of Christians have mounted
a petition campaign asking Kerry to make a genocide
declaration.

"America must end its silence about the ongoing genocide
against Christians and other minority groups in Iraq and
Syria," the petition says.

It cites as evidence of genocide the assassinations of church
leaders, mass murders and deportations, torture, kidnapping
for ransom, forcible conversions to Islam, and the sexual
enslavement and systematic rape of girls and women, as well
as destruction of Christian churches, monasteries, cemeteries
and artifacts.

"The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines 'genocide' as
killing and certain acts 'committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group,'" the petition says.

"Extensive and irrefutable evidence supports a finding that
the so-called Islamic State's mistreatment of Iraqi and
Syrian Christians, as well as Yazidis and other vulnerable
minorities, meets this definition."

The State Department is required by law to make a decision
one way or the other about genocide by mid-March.

The petition, found at StopTheChristianGenocide.org,
notes others who have made their own declaration of genocide
in the Middle East, including the Feb. 4 declaration by the
European Parliament, and the Feb. 12 joint declaration signed
by Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. Pope
Francis previously had called Islamic State's actions
genocide himself, The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,
the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and
Genocide Watch are among other groups that have issued
statements.

Presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton - who was Kerry's
predecessor as secretary of state - as well as Sens. Ted
Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also have called it
genocide.

The petition already has several high-profile Catholic
signers. Among the clergy, they include Cardinal Timothy M.
Dolan of New York; Archbishops Charles J. Chaput of
Philadelphia, Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles, Joseph E. Kurtz
of Louisville, Ky., the USCCB president, and William E. Lori
of Baltimore; and Bishops Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces, New
Mexico, Gregory Mansour of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Maronite
Diocese of St. Maron, and Sarhad Y. Jammo, who heads the San
Diego-based Eparchy of St. Peter the Apostle. The Chaldean
eparchy has a large population of Chaldean Catholic refugees
who have come to the United States.

Among the lay Catholic signers are Supreme Knight Carl
Anderson; Thomas Farr, director of the Religious Freedom
Project at the Georgetown University's Berkeley Center; Mary
Ann Glendon, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican; and the
Ethics and Public Policy Center's George Weigel, who wrote an
authorized biography of St. John Paul II.

On Capitol Hill Dec. 9, several groups testified at a House
hearing urging the State Department to declare the situation
genocide. On Dec. 4, Washington Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl was
among 30 Christian leaders who asked to meet with Kerry to
discuss the issue.